Humans Can Smell Danger: My Dad Proved It
Lead study author Dr Wen Li, of the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, in Chicago, said: "It's evolutionary. This helps us to have a very sensitive ability to detect something that is important to our survival from an ocean of environmental information. It warns us that it's dangerous and we have to pay attention to it. "The ability to discriminate between biologically meaningful cues such as the smell of a 175kg lion and similar but irrelevant stimuli such as the smell of a 3kg cat maximises an organism's response sensitivity while minimising hyper-vigilant and impulsive behaviours."
Scientists have conducted a study indicating that human beings can smell danger. From the story:Scientists found volunteers who were previously unable to differentiate between two similar scents learnt to tell them apart when given electric shocks alongside just one of them.They said the findings demonstrate how experiences help sharpen our senses to keep us clear of danger...
I found this interesting because some of my family history gives anecdotal validation to the concept. My father was a decorated veteran who fought in the Pacific Theater in WW II, primarily in New Guinea. He didn't talk much about his war experiences, but he did tell me a story that validates this study.
He was leading a patrol when a squad of Japanese soldiers sprang an ambush. It was a terrible fight, and during the battle Dad was knocked unconscious by an explosion. (He turned down a Purple Heart so as to not worry my mother at home.) Thereafter, he swore he was able to tell whenever the Japanese were near and that enabled him to avoid many dangers.
"How could you know?" I asked. "It was a jungle." He swore he could smell them, and whenever he had that sense, he was always right.
So, I believe the study. It worked for my dad in real life and that amazing ability to "smell" the enemy may well be why he survived the war and indeed, why I am here.
Labels: Human Sense of Smell
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:44 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
It's not racist, it's diet.
Many Asians said they hated the smell of Europeans (they could detect milk products on them) in the past.
Similarly, my friends said they could detect the fish sauce used by the Viet Cong if they were downwind from an group trying to attack.
That's why some units will ban perfume, scented soap etc. in combat, so they can blend in with the natives.
I understand that women can smell fear... there was a study somewhere that had them smell T-shirts of persons who had watched a very scary film and a control group (don't know what film the control group saw..). In any case, women who were asked to guess which T-shirts belonged to which film-viewers were remarkably accurate at "guessing" at who saw the scary ones. Men who were tested were unable to detect any difference at all in the odors. So women can smell fear, men can smell danger: hmmm
I figured diet too. But before that firefight, Dad could not detect it. Afterwards, he could. So that very subliminal knowledge came to the fore after he was almost killed.
When I was little, my folks found a dead guy out in the highland desert.
He died of a heart attack, so far as they could tell (he'd been there a week...) but I still remember the smell.
If I smelled it now, I'd know it in an instant. It's NOTHING like anything else I've ever sensed.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Humans take all ten of their senses for granted and rarely exercize them, so when something triggers them into "protection" mode, it seems like something weird, mysterious or miraculous.
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